Project Guernica Gets a Life

Yesterday, I moseyed down to the lower levels of my apartment building to work at a table in the lobby. Sometimes I do that: Pack some apples, a mug of tea, and situate myself facing downtown Albuquerque and watch people running across the street without waiting for the light to change. It’s a reminder that life goes on, that there are people out there whom I cannot imagine what it is to be them. That woman driving the white truck — where does she go to work? Does she have children? What did she dream of being when she was young? Does she study Spanish like I do?

I love watching humanity. We are such special creatures. If only we waited until the crosswalk lit up to dash out into traffic.

Perhaps I have written here about the starting and stopping that comes with breaking ground in Project Guernica. Armed with my legal pad and the journals that contain the actual writing of the book, I set myself up a tall table that I call my standing desk. A brigade of fountain pens, extra sheets of paper, and the book’s outline tumbled across the table. Personally, I am fond of the scritch-scratch sound the fountain pen makes as it warbles across the page, the way the ink oozes into its place in life. On the legal pad, I was filling out the Proust Questionnaire for my two main characters. This is a common tactic for me as I sift through characters, setting, theme, and all the gooey things that merge for a book.

I cannot say where the breakthrough began.

One minute, I was staring at the tiny lights embedded in my standing desk, the next, I knew that this book was about mothers far more than I thought it was. The archetype of the mother — the fact that she is departing from her time as the maiden (a position that she has known her entire life), the fact that she engenders the new world. I scrawled some answers from the Questionnaire on my legal pad, and I knew this all to be true. Our protagonist’s central fear is losing her mother in not only a literal sense, but very much in a figurative sense as well.

Then it was as though a dam were ruptured and cool waters surveyed every inch of the scene with their power and force. Project Guernica is a dual perspective novel, and I have been dreading writing the second POV because it struck me as too repetitive and too dawdling. Now I know that it is wickedly funny (Now I must attempt to be funny), speaks of speculative nonfiction, and is dynamic, an echo chamber of hopes and fears and the eye of history.

That was it. I was standing at my table, thinking of how to answer a single prompt on the Questionnaire, and the world broke like an egg. I can see its veins clearly, the way the blood muscles through them and feeds them. Those were the revelations: Mothers and character traits. We are the things we never knew we had inside us.

My first instinct was to pace, so that is what I did. I’m sure that it looked strange to the people outside the windows, this woman patrolling the lobby of a massive apartment complex. It is not that I don’t want to write at my beloved desk (I am writing at it now); it is that I sometimes need to pretend that I am in the world. Living as I do, shut off from people, is comfortable for me, but I want an active life, not a passive one. Perhaps that has been the problem all along as I circle Project Guernica, looking fruitlessly for a weak spot to break into: That is am not living life actively. As I work towards becoming a professional linguist and an author, I have felt so dependent on agents, on other people. The great realization of one’s thirties, of course, is that no one gives you permission for the direction of your life.

Project Guernica is going to be a bit longer than I had anticipated it being. I was aiming for 80,000 words. I’m thinking now that it will be about 100,000. With its shiny new shoes, I can see it walking some distances around the moon and back to my little apartment in Albuquerque. I see myself one day translating it into Spanish. The excitement is there, and it bubbles up through me so rapidly that my wee pen cannot keep up. The outline is heavily annotated with ideas and notes to keep in mind.

This is also a call to research this book. I had to study the Great Depression in my first book, but this one is set in a foreign country that I have never visited, is rooted in a period of history that I did not live through, and requires a great deal of knowledge about, among other things: Women, myth, war, conquest, theology, and hell. I have books on everything from La Malinche to the history of hell, and I am going in with my annotation kit.

Something has been loosened in me, that dam severed with a fine set of shears. I have to make some character charts, but I have a notebook set aside for character biographies and diaries. With that, I will meander away from this blog, stop wondering if people are crossing the street illegally, and get to work.